Claudia Rankine

her race and herself. While passing as a typical white American, Clare forgets her roots as a black woman. This forces her to later feel like she is living two separate lives. This similar concept is applied many times throughout Citizen by Claudia Rankine as well, by displaying the narrator’s conflict with choosing to defend their black identity or separate and ignore it in certain situations. However, this shows many members of the black community are faced with this conflict, and are forced…

The novels “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison, “Brown Girl, Brownstones” by Paule Marshall and “Citizen An American Lyric” by Claudia all are different books that tell different stories and written by different people, but one thing all 3 of these book share in common is a very old but important social issue which is Race and Racism. The way these authors use their topics as a subdivision of the theme or a social issue so that their main point becomes more clear and understandable is very…

manifest as subtly charged statements, impulsive reactions generated towards one’s race before realizing the implications and apologizing. While the apology may be received, the damage is done and the microaggression has left its scar on the victim. Claudia Rankine’s Citizen calls attention to a scarred section of the populace through its depiction of the myriad microaggressions that plague race relations in America. For…

a book by Claudia Rankine it details various struggles and happenings happening to African American in the United States. The book is composed as poems in various chapters, while in others she details the struggles of certain people, and in lastly some are short little stories or tragedies that have happened to people in the African American community. The book in the end is just a collection of what Rankine deems important are issues happening to African Americans in the states. Rankine…

Claudia Rankine’s Citizen poses a dynamic relationship between the two terms microaggressions and macroaggressions. In a critical analysis of Citizen, Heather Love suggests, “Microaggressions can be understood as a point of articulation in a larger circuit of violence: although they barely cross the threshold of visibility (indeed, are sometimes referred to as “invisible racism”), effective description can bring them more clearly into view” (Love 436). Love’s interpretation of the usage of…

Americans are often faced with oppression. In order to combat this oppression, Black Americans are forced to try to change the way they act so they will be viewed as less intimidating or threatening to White Americans. In Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine discusses an argument relating to Serena Williams. She says, “She has grown up,… as if responding to the Injustice of…

black people. White America’s inability to understand African Americans is echoed in Claudia Rankine’s essay, “The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning”. Rankine recounts the deaths of African Americans by the hands of the police, she expresses the fear that she and her friends have for their children, and she interprets the intentions of Black Lives Matter. Using recent black deaths as examples, Rankine reveals that “though the white…

After I learned to question everything, focus on diction, syntax and the author 's style throughout the course, I came to realize Claudia Rankine main focus was not just racism as a whole. She encourages the readers to undergo the experience and truly understand racism and discrimination. Not only did Rankine give multiple examples and encounters but she also incorporated artworks that spoke louder than the words. To the left is Carrie Mae Weems’s,“Blue Black Boy”. This…

connected to her point, which is that the past perceptions of black people and what it means to be a black person in a society of white folks make it difficult to establish an individual identity outside of that box that you were born into. Thus as Rankine put it, black bodies are in some sense…

How does Claudia Rankine’s portrayal of James Craig Anderson’s murder in situation 3 of chapter 7 and “The Slave Ship” by J.M.W. Turner sheds light on the systemic racism and dehumanization of black individuals throughout history and in America, and what impact does this have on broader themes of race, violence and identity in modern societies? Claudia Rankine's "Citizen: An American Lyric" and J.M.W. Turner's painting "The Slave Ship" both serve as powerful critiques of systemic racism,…